CEO Perspectives

04/06/2016

Ron Sege, our Chairman and CEO, was interviewed recently by Randy Reid, editor and founder of the Edison Report. Randy and Ron sat down at the Light + Building conference in Frankfurt, Germany and talked about Echelon, our recent streetlight deployment in Cambridge and the future of lighting controls. Below find a sneak peek of the Q&A. If you want to read the entire questions & answers, click here.

Randy: We saw a press release about a large job in Cambridge.

Ron: Cambridge, MA deployed about 5,500 lights, which was a combination of cobraheads for street lighting as well as many decorative luminaires. We created one system with multiple controllable zones. In addition to turning on and off, we dim the luminaires for additional savings. The city retrofitted their existing luminaires with LED and deployed Echelon using a combination of wireless and power line carrier communications. We used wireless on the cobraheads and PLC on the decorative, as our system supports both. This way no one has to drill holes in the decorative fixtures and add antennas.

Randy: If a customer typically saves 50% with LED, how much additional can they save with controls?

Ron: Typically Echelon will save about an additional 35%. In Cambridge, when the lights turn on at sunset, they start out at about 50% and then the intensity changes at various times during the night based on whether it is a residential area or industrial area. Also, as the LED output degrades over time, which they do, the city turns the lights up to maintain a constant light level.

Randy: What are your LIGHTFAIR plans in San Diego?

Ron: We are very excited about LIGHTFAIR and we will be exhibiting our Cambridge applications where cobraheads and decorative will be together. We want to show that Echelon allows customers to really connect anything to anything.

05/15/2015

Last week Echelon attended the annual LIGHTFAIR International Show at New York City’s Javits Center. LIGHTFAIR 2015 is one of the largest shows in the world for lighting technology, design, fixtures and services. As many as 26,000 visitors and 575 exhibitors participated in this year’s show, which organizers say set a record for attendance.

I have three takeaways from LFI:

1) There’s significantly increased interest in connected lighting controls, or the ‘Lighting Industrial Internet of Things’ (L-IIoT). I heard a lot more talk about the importance of controls, and more control technologies were on display. At the Echelon booth, we fielded a lot more questions than in previous years about specific applications and project deployments.To me, this suggests that controls are moving from ‘thinking about’ to ‘doing’ in key applications. As technologies such as multi-color LEDs for white-tuning and sensor integration become mainstream, this can drive the adoption of connected controls—because the business and societal benefits of these additional capabilities simply cannot be realized without connectivity.

2) The LED transition is continuing to gain momentum. In 2014, according to Strategies Unlimited, LED light engines made up almost 50% of the revenue generated by all light source types. Even with this, only 5% of the installed base of 30 billion+ light sources is now LEDs. So, we are only at the beginning of the LED transition. Not only will this mean more efficient lighting, but more range of functionality, as well.

3) LEDs are quickly becoming more feature-rich, which means they can provide more utility to more users as time goes on. A great example of this is white-tuning, which was on display conspicuously in the show for the first time this year. There’s a growing body of research that says that tunable LEDs can improve students’ ability to learn, accelerate recovery in health situations, and even improve customer satisfaction and generate increased sales in retail environments.

These are examples of how LED technologies can move beyond simple energy savings to providing strategic business benefits. For more information on white-tuning, or so-called human-centric lighting, a good overview can be found here, and very interesting work is being done here.

In line with these themes, at the show Echelon demonstrated our new Lumewave by Echelon lighting control platform, with the theme, “If you have it, we can control it.” What does that mean? We offer unified outdoor and indoor controls. We can connect virtually any fixture and sensor to support a wide variety of applications. And we have both secure wired communications links and fast-to-deploy wireless ones. And we have an integrated solution from “device to cloud” for easy installation, startup, commissioning, monitoring and management.

We also featured our newly enhanced Customer Management System for easy startup, commissioning, monitoring and managing of the system. We also had fun with a proof-of-concept demo of how our system controls white-tuning applications. In this demonstration, we remotely adjusted the color temperature of a fixture from cool white (toward the blue end of the spectrum) to warm white (toward the reds), along with on, off and dimming.

Echelon also participated in two panels, educating attendees on next-generation lighting controls, which had an estimated combined audience of more than 300 people. The first panel was titled “Transformation of the Lighting Industry to an Integrated Electronic Platform” and I spoke on that along with Menko Deroos, CEO and co-founder, Xicato. The second panel, “Lighting, Building Automation and IIoT Convergence: Perils and Promise,” featured Echelon’s CTO Sohrab Mohdi, along with John Curcio, chief commercial officer, Cupertino Electric; Jerry Mix, CEO, Finelite Inc.; and Noah Goldstein, research director, Navigant Research. Both panels generated lots of questions about the value of lighting controls, how they work, how secure they are, etc.

As the LFI show made abundantly clear, the transition to LED lighting, and the advancement of LED and lighting IIoT technologies, is driving lighting from being mostly about utility and efficiency to being a key element of business outcomes and strategies. Look for Echelon to continue our focus on adapting our innovations to the lighting world.

01/20/2015

What will we see in the coming year in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology trends, and how will they transform how we work, play, and live? Here are a few musings from Ron Sege's vantage point as Chairman and CEO of Echelon Corp., a leading control networking company for the IIoT:

Ron Sege, CEO, Chairman, Echelon

Spotlight on...lighting. With all the talk of thermostats, wearables, door locks, and security systems in the Internet of Things (IoT), the most ubiquitous “thing” in the world is often overlooked: the 20+ billion lighting fixtures in the world. Outdoor lighting—everything from streetlights to illumination of parking lots, auto dealerships, airports, and shopping malls—will increasingly provide a focal point for IIoT installations because the value of controlling and monitoring each light is so high.

As lighting technologies become more controllable –on/off, dimming, color control/white-tuning, etc.—we will see these fixtures connected to the IIoT at an accelerating rate. In addition, indoor lighting systems will increasingly integrate with other building automation-related networks.

Finally, because lighting fixtures are so ubiquitous, once they become connected they are the natural place to integrate sensors of all kinds. All the talk of intelligent buildings and smarter cities will start shifting to action in 2015.

Convergence, and more convergence. The IoT is about the convergence of previously disparate systems, technologies, and organizations. In the consumer IoT world, look for ever-greater convergence of siloed systems for smart homes so that these solutions become more than simply “remote control of devices using mobile phones.”

In the Industrial IoT, we expect accelerating convergence of existing, long-lived, operationally oriented devices (what we refer to as operational technology, or OT) with Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled platforms under the domain of information technology (IT) departments. The organizations that recognize this OT/IT convergence, and prepare for it with the right skills and organizational changes, will be the early beneficiaries of the IoT.

We’ll see acceleration of a different kind of convergence as well – in the form of partnerships and mergers and acquisitions among previously disparate companies, even competitors. There’s enormous power in the integration of synergistic technologies, product offerings, and distribution channels. Rather than go it alone, companies will look for ways to optimize their strengths while shoring up their weaknesses. Look for all kinds of unexpected corporate convergences to start flowering in the coming years.

Connectivity convergence, driven by highly optimized and less-expensive chipsets, is taking shape as numerous OT protocols (LonWorks, BACnet, DALI, KNX, etc.) converge to run over IP, enabled on the end device through targeted processing power, optimal memory, and excellent battery life. It is interesting to think that the IoT will drive a different spin on Moore’s Law: Rather than ever-more processing power at the same cost, the IoT will demand ever-more optimized processing power at ever-lower costs.

At the facilities management level, convergence will mean less distinction between traditional building automation (heavily focused on HVAC), lighting controls, window blind/shade controls, security, surveillance, and new kinds of sensor deployments. Also, job titles and duties involving OT—such as facilities managers and manufacturing engineers—will converge with the job titles and duties of IT, such as CIO, networking and database admins, and data analysts. We might see entirely new titles, such as Chief Information and Operations Officer (CIOO). Or will it be COIO?

More products made in the U.S. IIoT technologies will help spur significant efficiency increases in multiple phases of the manufacturing and distribution process. When these technologies are combined with other global trends—such as increases in manufacturing costs in traditionally low-cost regions; a closing of the wage gap globally; and the speed-to-market advantages of local supply chains—it bodes well for a resurgence of the U.S. manufacturing sector.

Additionally, companies will be able to get their products to market faster, thus speeding time to revenue. That’s because IIoT convergence can shrink upfront development investments as well as tooling and testing costs. Plus, add-on services— hallmark of the IIoT realm—can often be launched faster than hardware-based products.

“Big data” will demand more and better “small data.” Increasingly sophisticated analytics platforms will enable consumers and businesses to more easily transform a glut of data into valuable information for cost savings, productivity improvements, and—perhaps most importantly—customer satisfaction, lifestyle, and health improvements.

Let’s not forget, though, that big data can’t just assume that all the right source data is available in a usable and understandable fashion. It takes the right kind of small data—well-defined (think metadata or device profiles) from individual sensors or task-specific distributed applications—to enable the big data analytics. In 2015, there will need to be more attention focused on better ways to standardize, gather, pre-process, and transport that small data.

At your service... As more IIoT-connected devices and IIoT applications enter the marketplace, we’ll see a shift from a product- to a service-oriented focus in the full range of offerings. Product companies will start adding services components, and services companies will both expand their scope of services and also add sensor-enabled device products.

Buyers of these products and services will enjoy enhanced value and lower risk, and vendors will enjoy increased revenues. Increasingly, customers will turn to energy services companies (ESCOs) to handle the capital costs and deployment complexities, and those ESCOs will share in the cost savings generated.

Lighting as a service, anyone?

Closer to the edge. Intelligence, control, security, IP enablement—all will continue to move closer to the edge of the IoT, turning back the client-server model that has become standard in computer architectures. This trend will be especially important in the IIoT, where peer-to-peer device communication, decision-making, and action, without intervention by humans or the time it takes to wait for direction via a cloud-based server, is often the only realistic and practical option. Think about any real-time response needed in any industrial or commercial system, and the wisdom of at-the-edge intelligence and control is obvious.

The IIoT will become sexy. It’s been asserted that the value of the IIoT will eventually dwarf that of the consumer IoT. That ‘eventually’ could be as soon as 2016. And in the meantime, we’ll continue to see ever-higher estimates of the potential for the IIoT. Will it reach half a trillion dollars in spending, and $1.7 trillion in cumulative net value, by 2020, as Wikibon predicts? Or will estimates of $15 trillion of global GDP by 2030 come to pass? Or is the potential even greater as McRock Capital suggests? Whatever the value, it’s clear that the IIoT will drive the next wave of productivity increases and therefore global living standard improvements for both developed and emerging economies.

IoT as a term will become less common... because the reality of the IoT will become commonplace. The technologies and capabilities labeled IoT or IIoT will increasingly be just how things are done. This new technology will ‘just disappear’ and increasingly be taken for granted as how things are done. It might take a bit beyond 2015 for this transition to take place, but not too much longer.

In summary... Of course, it’s impossible to foretell the future, and any predictions are likely to serve as future embarrassments. Still, it’s fun to start a new year with some lively prognostications, especially in an area as fast-moving as the IIoT.

12/23/2014

It’s that time again! As the year draws to a close, it seems fitting to review Echelon’s progress and achievements during 2014.

Spoiler alert:

Our decisions and actions this past year helped propel the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to the level of general awareness, while positioning Echelon to enjoy a happy 2015.

Here are a few highlights from last year:

Partnerships and More

We greatly expanded our presence in outdoor lighting with the acquisition of Lumewave Inc., an established outdoor lighting control system provider with a strong track record in the U.S.

Echelon signed a major distribution agreement with Digi-Key, the industry leader in electronic component selection, availability, and delivery. Digi-Key is now distributing our portfolio of products—chips, modules, routers, and software—worldwide (except Japan) for the IIoT market.

We sold our grid operations to S&T AG, a publicly traded European IT systems provider with an existing focus on smart energy products and services. The sale lets us focus all our resources on becoming a key enabler in the IIoT.

Products

We introduced and demonstrated the building industry’s first multiprotocol system-on-chip (SoC), the FT 6050 system—part of Echelon’s IzoT™ platform for the IIoT. This single-chip provides reliable, cost-effective, flexible wired IP-based connectivity for communities of devices, designed to speed migration from legacy control networks to the IIoT.

We also introduced our FT 6000 Evaluation and Development Kit (EVK), aimed at developers who are creating, testing, and deploying devices and control applications for the IIoT.

We hosted demonstrations of our advanced lighting control technologies, including ‘follow-me,’ or adaptive, outdoor lighting solutions.

In conjunction with Xicato, we demonstrated a proof of concept (PoC) for Lighting 2.0: the convergence of networking, building automation, and lighting technologies.

We made 8 million additional IIoT connections in 2014, based on our chip sales.

With the acquisition of Lumewave, we welcomed Mark Keating, Lumewave’s former chief executive, as our new director of product management.

Echelon CEO and Chairman Ron Sege was named to the advisory board of McRock Capital, a venture firm that invests exclusively in IIoT companies.

Ron Sege was also inducted into the Junior Achievement (JA) of Northern California Business Hall of Fame.

Events

Echelon exhibited and demonstrated at major industry shows, including Light + Building in Germany; LIGHTFAIR International in Las Vegas; Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition in China; AHR Expo in New York; and embedded world Conference and Exhibition in Germany.

Echelon representatives spoke at a number of conferences during 2014, including the Internet of Things Global Summit at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.; the inaugural Internet of Things Developers Conference (IoT DevCon) in Santa Clara, California; the Connected Cloud Summit IoT Forum in Boston; the IHS Industrial Automation Conference in London; IBcon (Intelligent Buildings Conference) in Las Vegas; TiEcon in Silicon Valley, California; the McRock IIoT Symposium in Montreal; Mobility 2014 in Paris; and CeBIT in Hannover, Germany.

Connections

In keeping with Echelon’s single-minded focus on the IIoT, we rebranded Echelon and launched a new website in October. The effort was led by Wendy Toth, Echelon’s chief marketing officer.

We initiated an ongoing segment of the Echelon blog called ‘IIoT Talks,’ wide-ranging Q&A-style conversations between industry luminaries and Echelon about the IIoT market. IIoT Talks participants in 2014 included Chris Rommel, executive vice president of the market intelligence firm VDC Research; Patrick Moorhead, founder, president & principal analyst, and Paul Teich, CTO and senior analyst, of Moor Insights & Strategy; Scott MacDonald, co-founder of McRock Capital; Loring Wirbel, senior analyst at The Linley Group and senior editor of Networking Report; Bill Morelli, associate director of M2M and IoT at IHS Technology; Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of the strategic consulting company THINKstrategies; Jesse Foote, senior research analyst for the market research firm Navigant Research; Menko Deroos, CEO and co-founder of the innovative lighting company Xicato; and David Stephenson, a leading IoT strategist.

For some of the IIoT Talks conversations, Echelon CEO Ron Sege builds on the questions and answers by providing his own commentary, insight, advice, and other thoughts in an IIoT Talks Dialogue series.

Echelon sponsored and participated in a number of well-attended webinars during the year, focusing primarily on outdoor lighting.

Clearly, it was a busy and productive year for Echelon. We look forward to 2015 invigorated, focused, and excited about building upon our 25 years of control networking leadership to help shape the exciting world of the IIoT.

10/01/2014

Echelon CEO Ron Sege will be the featured luncheon speaker and join a Smart Cities panel discussion at the Internet of Things (IoT) Global Summit at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Oct. 27.

Sege will present and discuss opportunities for smart cities with moderator Nigel Cameron, president and CEO of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, and fellow panelists Sokwoo Rhee, associate director of Cyber-Physical Systems at the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST); Joseph Bradley, managing director of Cisco’s Internet of Everything practice; and other industry experts.

Immediately following the Smart Cities panel at the summit luncheon, Sege will be the featured speaker.

“Buildings, streetlights, warehouses, trucks and factories: That’s where you’ll find the money to jumpstart the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT),” Sege says. His luncheon topic will be, appropriately, “Follow the Money to the Industrial IoT.”

The summit brings Echelon together with more than 200 other key stakeholders for discussions on the critical policies and commercial opportunities surrounding the IoT. Find out more information about the Oct. 27-28 event at iotsummit@forum-global.com.

06/16/2014

In this IIoT Talks Dialogue series, Echelon CEO and Chairman Ron Sege builds on questions and answers covered during Echelon’s IIoT Talks with industry luminaries, providing his own commentary, insight, advice, and other thoughts.

From Conversation With Loring Wirbel, Senior Analyst, The Linley Group:

Question from Echelon: Do you have any advice for those who resist moving to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)?

Loring Wirbel: They have to realize that the war is over, and the game has been won! IP and Ethernet are the future, and digging in your heels and being stubborn isn’t going to change that fact. It’s worth pointing out that from the very dawn of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee had a vision for IP addresses everywhere.

Ron Sege responds:

As Loring Wirbel goes on to say, the inevitability of IP addressability does not mean that industrial devices need to abandon their existing market-specific protocols to become part of the IIoT. But that’s true only if they’re offered an affordable, practical technology ‘bridge’ to the IIoT future.

Unlike in the consumer IoT, where the vast majority of devices and applications were created relatively recently and with IP in mind, there are a billion or so industrial devices on isolated networks using a variety of pre-IP protocols. These network ‘islands’ can’t interoperate with one another or with IP networks.

Because Echelon has long-standing, deep roots providing control networking solutions for these industrial communities of devices, we are ideally positioned to offer the bridging technologies that can help legacy industrial devices join the IIoT, without forcing them to change how they already operate.

For example, in the building automation market we enable a single device to use either or both of the leading building automation protocols—BACnet and LonWorks—while also making it IP-enabled, for communication with IP networks.

This capability is of benefit not only to the owners and operators of the buildings, but also to the vendors of building automation devices. Traditionally, these vendors needed to either choose one protocol or the other as the basis of their products, or offer duplicate lines of products for each protocol. Of course, this meant either losing out on the opportunity to bid on at least half the projects available, or absorbing the extra costs involved in developing and managing two separate sets of inventory.

Echelon’s solutions based on our IzoT™ platform for the IIoT turn ‘either/or’ into ‘both/and’ for developers and users of industrial devices alike. We’re helping to lower resistance to the IIoT by making interoperability and IP enablement an easy, affordable option for existing, often long-lived, industrial devices and applications.

[I might also add that Ethernet may not be the best solution for applications requiring wired connections. Our well-established Free Topology wiring is low cost, easy to install, very flexible in terms of topology and very resilient.]

And to close with more of Loring Wirbel’s words from his IIoT Talks interview:

“The best way to sneak IP past the fuddy-duddies is to offer easy co-existence with legacy network stacks. Even those who resist realize that IP is the future. They might drag their heels, but they know that eventually they’ll have to make their networks IP-compatible. Echelon is doing the right thing here by providing multiprotocol, multistack models. Large-scale adoption of the IIoT will still take some top-down mandates, but tools such as Echelon’s will make the move more widely palatable.

06/10/2014

Echelon’s CEO Ron Sege is the keynote speaker at the McRock IIoT Symposium on June 12, 2014, in Montreal, Canada. In a speech entitled “A Few Learnings from the Front Lines of the IIoT,” Sege highlights what the IoT is, the size of the market, and where the money is.

Sege focuses on learnings from Echelon’s 25 years building device communication and control platforms for 110 million devices in industrial applications. He points out how Robert Metcalfe’s Law for computer networking will also apply to the IoT, and therefore underscores the importance of connecting the almost 1 billion existing devices in industrial control networks to the Internet. He also highlights the importance of extreme reliability, scalability, and interoperability in industrial applications.

Sege includes in his talk these four prognostications:

IoT will happen, and it will add big value to world economies.

It will happen first where there is strong, clear customer value to be unlocked.

People underestimate the challenges and the timeframes required for the IoT to develop. There are many challenges to surmount.

The industry will need new skills, new technologies, new ecosystems, and new public policy to grow at its maximum potential.

Other notable speakers at the third annual McRock IIoT Symposium include representatives from Cisco, GE, IBM, Intel, Shell Technology Ventures, and Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures. Taking place at the Hotel St-Paul in Montreal, Canada, the symposium brings together the world’s leading Industrial Internet of Things companies to share knowledge, solutions, and opportunities in the IIoT sector.

After a full day packed with keynotes, panels, and company presentations, participants will enjoy a networking session and guest speaker. Attendees will have the opportunity to question panelists and gain knowledge on how new technologies are being applied in the field.

McRock Capital is the first dedicated Industrial Internet venture capital company focused on the intersection of sensors and software in large industrial markets. Co-founded by entrepreneurial venture capitalists Scott MacDonald and Whitney Rockley, McRock Capital has a talent for identifying and scaling information technology businesses within multi-billion-dollar sectors.

TiEcon 2014, taking place May 16 and 17 in Santa Clara, California, calls the IoT “the next huge wave of growth on the Internet.” McKinsey Global Institute’s ‘Disruptive Technologies’ report predicts the IoT will have as much as a $6 trillion impact on the world economy by 2025, with 50 billion connected devices.

Echelon specializes in connectivity solutions for the portion of the IoT known as the Industrial IoT (IIoT), which is expected to soon surpass the consumer or human IoT in size and economic impact. One of the big challenges in industrial markets, however, is enabling the billion or so existing devices, already connected on various incompatible non-IP networks, to participate in the IIoT.

Echelon’s IzoT™ platform for the IIoT not only supports all the new IP-enabled industrial devices and applications being developed, but also makes it simple and cost-effective for legacy industrial devices to become part of the IIoT. In this way, Echelon provides an important bridge between the old and the new.

TiEcon 2014 is the 21st gathering of one of the largest and longest ongoing conferences focused on entrepreneurship and technology innovation. According to conference organizers, the full-day Internet of Things track “will explore all the major IoT trends and the disruptive opportunities they will create for startup innovation, consumer value and enjoyment, societal benefit, and wealth creation.”

05/05/2014

In this IIoT Talks Dialogue series, Echelon CEO and Chairman Ron Sege builds on questions and answers covered during Echelon’s IIoT Talks with industry luminaries, providing his own commentary, insight, advice, and other thoughts.

From conversation with Scott MacDonald, co-founder of McRock Capital:

Question from Echelon: Would you say the Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT, is here to stay as a market category?

McRock Capital: I think the IIoT moniker will stick, as it relates to the whole area of machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity, software analytics, and all the value that comes out of it, from non-consumer devices.

The ‘IIoT,’ meaning industrial devices connected together to monitor and control the real world, has been around under a variety of names for many decades. In fact, Echelon itself has been developing solutions for industrial and commercial connected applications for many years.

Ron Sege, Echelon

What is being anticipated today, and talked about under the new heading of IIoT, is an acceleration of the benefits of deploying connected devices in industrial settings. This is for a variety of technical reasons: The cost of the components to make a connected device has fallen; connectivity, via cellular and wired connections, has become near ubiquitous; and cloud-based analytics platforms can track and analyze data in near-real time. This acceleration is also the result of a very important business reason: Commercial and industrial businesses everywhere face hyper-competition these days, which means they are demanding real-time process optimization for high customer service and low cost. Only connected devices can deliver this benefit.

Given our heritage and our passion, Echelon is excited about the potential of the IIoT market, and we’re pleased that the ‘IIoT’ terminology we initiated has become the accepted way to refer to the important portion of the IoT that’s devoted to industrial applications.

Over the past year, as we’ve refocused our foundational control networking platform toward helping companies migrate toward the IIoT, we’ve visited nearly 100 of our top commercial customers and partners, listening closely to be sure we understand their challenges and opportunities. With more than 110 million Echelon LonWorks and LonTalk nodes shipped into smart grid, smart building, and smart city applications over the years, our customers and partners have a wealth of real-world experience to draw from.

We heard a few things quite consistently. Our customers:

See a big difference between the consumer IoT and the industrial IoT, with the IIoT requiring the highest levels of reliability, scalability, and security

Want to leverage IIoT benefits without having to ‘rip and replace’ the many existing devices already connected to traditional control systems

Are not interested in creating additional versions of their products to support new protocols such as IPv6; in fact, they would like to reduce the number of protocol-, or language-specific models they offer

Value the extremely high reliability of wired solutions such as our Free Topology, but also need wireless connections

Are enthusiastic that Echelon has chosen to apply our deep knowledge of device networking and control, developed over the past 25 year, to this IIoT market segment

The tangible result of our findings is our IzoT™ platform for the IIoT. It is built on IP and supports a number of the historic protocols that connect some 1 billion devices in the world today. It is proven scalable to millions of devices. It is a peer-to-peer distributed system and so can operate at the highest levels of reliability–with or without connectivity to the Internet. It recognizes connected devices and their capabilities so is easily configured and commissioned. And, because it is a complete architecture, it gets designs to market faster and at lower risk.

I encourage you to contact Echelon to learn more about the IzoT platform and how it can help both new and legacy industrial devices participate in the benefits of the growing IIoT market.

You might also like:

IIoT Talks: McRock Capital: Differences Between the Consumer and Industrial Internet of Things

04/15/2014

In this IIoT Talks Dialogue series, Echelon CEO and Chairman Ron Sege builds on questions and answers covered during Echelon’s IIoT Talks with industry luminaries, providing his own commentary, insight, advice, and other thoughts.

Patrick Moorhead and Paul Teich, Moor Insights & Strategy:Customers want to know the answer to one major question: If I invest now in IIoT solutions, will my investment still be good in 10 years?

Ron Sege responds: A corollary question we hear often from customers is about how soon they will see a return on their IIoT investment. We see the potential for the IIoT to improve productivity and quality of life at least as much as the Internet of computers has done, if not more. But I think it’s important to understand what it will take to unlock the ROI inherent in the IIoT.

Ron Sege, CEO

The fact is, many commercial and industrial environments have a large installed base of pre-IP networked devices, running a multitude of incompatible protocols. These range from LonWorks and BACnet networks controlling HVAC systems, to DALI lighting controllers, to SCADA systems on the electrical grid. These long-lived assets need to be either integrated into the IIoT as they are, or replaced with versions running IP-based protocols.

In addition, networks of mission-critical devices have different requirements for reliability, scale, and security than the networks of computers now on the Internet. The IIoT industry is working diligently on standards and technologies to meet these requirements; however, this work will take time. Plus, many new entrants to the IIoT market will need to be educated on the different demands and use cases between the Internet of Computers and the Internet of Things.

At Echelon, we’re focused on accelerating the time-to-ROI for commercial and industrial customers. We are doing this both by enabling pre-IP devices to be integrated into the IIoT, and by building a highly reliable, scalable, and secure multiprotocol platform that we are calling the IzoT™ platform. By helping our customers avoid rip-and-replace upgrades, and by meeting the unique needs of commercial and industrial applications, we help customers take advantage of the promise of the IIoT most quickly.

You might also like:

IIoT Talks: Moor Insights & Strategy: Misconceptions About the IIoT

IIoT Talks: Moor Insights & Strategy: Steps Companies Can Take to be Successful in the Emerging IIoT Market

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